“The Laws of Cool” author to speak at VCU

By Tom Gresham

Alan Liu, celebrated author of the “The Laws of Cool,” will speak this week at Virginia Commonwealth University on the evolution of knowledge in the era of such new media tools as blogs, wikis and social networking sites.

Liu’s talk, “Knowledge 2.0? The Relation of the University to Web 2.0,” will be held on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Richmond Salons of the Student Commons, 907 Floyd Ave. The event is free and open to the public.

Liu, an English professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the founder of the pioneering Web site, “Voice of the Shuttle,” which provides a guide to online resources in a wide array of humanities-related categories. Site users tend to be students and teachers. Liu’s book, “The Laws of Cool,” examines the relationship of the humanities and arts to information culture and of the information culture to the business of “knowledge work.”

Liu’s appearance is part of VCU’s year-long series, “Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age,” which is sponsored by the Department of English in collaboration with the School of Mass Communications and the School of the Arts. The series is funded by the VCU Honors College through its National Endowment for the Humanities Year program.

For more information about this event and the “Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age” series, visit www.creatingculture.vcu.edu.